First Impressions - Part I: Arrival in Osaka

Sorry about yesterday's post. I'm having a lot of trouble with the computers here since I can't read anything at all and things keep happening the way they're not supposed to.

I'm now in Media Cafe, a big internet cafe in Umeda. Internet cafes are plentiful here and are really strange for a few reasons. First of all, when you come in, they give you the choice of four or five different classes of internet usage, depending on whether you want your own private room, a couch to sit on rather than a chair, your own TV next to your computer, etc. I opted for the most basic form today, but last night they gave me my own private "office" where I had a little TV.

The second strange thing is that they have HUGE libraries of Japanese comic books that you're allowed to read while you're using their computers and people seem to take full advantage of this. The guys on either side of me have both kicked back from their computers and are fliping through some comics and it was the same last night.

Finally, not only do they serve drinks, but all drinks are free. There's a "drink room" with big vending machines that you don't need to put money into, you just press buttons and the drinks come out. I think that this feature would be significantly abused in North America so I take the initiative to abuse it as much as possible and am currently working on an iced "Cafe Vienna". The one in my neighbourhood even had a slushie machine.

The girl three seats down from me is wearing a blanket and appears to be passed out face flat on the keyboard. I can see a "Shower" room and a "Shampoo" room and they are selling food, CDs and "Men's Trunks" by the front desk. I'm beginning to wonder if I'll ever fully understand what this culture is up to.

So if you haven't guessed, I've arrived in Osaka. It's now Friday morning and I arrived Wednesday evening, so I've had a good solid day and a half to explore my surroudings and everything is becoming less intimidating which feels good. So let me get back to where I left off in my last post and quickly cover my last bit in Vancouver and the flight...

I met Sushi in front of the hostel and we went to HI Vancouver Central on Granville Street where the pub crawl left from. It was a lot of fun, there were about 15 of us though I spent the majority of the night hanging out in a group of about six of us (with a couple of Germans, an Australian and a Brit). The rest of them are all going to be staying in Vancouver for a while (some up to a year). We went to four different bars. The first one had an Atlantic Canada theme -- they served Keith's and Moosehead, had Acadian and Maritime flags and had sea paraphernalia on the walls. They had a poster of "The Pubs of Halifax!" but most of them have been torn down as far back as I remember. I think the best one was called something like "The Furniture Warehouse", where the foreigners were delighted of the prospect of shelled peanuts in a bar. My group of six ended up returning there at the end of the night.

I went to bed around 1:30am and was woken up at 5:30am by the Spaniard Jose who was leaving for the 6am bus to Seattle. He scolded Irish Brian for having made too much noise the night before (?) and Australian Dave had still not come home from his previous night's escapades.

I don't think I went back to sleep, but somehow time flew by a couple of hours and I didn't go down for breakfast until around 8:50am. When I was packing up my bags around 9:30am, I checked the schedule of the airport shuttle and saw that the last one before nearing 11am was 9:40ish so I just threw everything in my bags and scurried up to the Sandman Suites where I managed to catch the shuttle.

I was checked in at the airport at 10:30am, killed a couple of hours in the airport gift shops and proceeded up to my gate around 11:45am. There was only one other white guy at the gate; he was carrying a suit bag and was staring at me, so assuming he was one of the other NOVA teachers (NOVA is the Japanese school I was teaching with and there were seven of us on that flight) I introduced myself. His name was Jerimiah and he was from New York state. He had been stationed with the US Peace Corps on Vanuatu (South Pacific island) and had met his Japanese fiancee there and was teaching with NOVA as a means to live with her in Osaka.

We boarded the plane, it was one of those ones where the seats go like
OO-OOO-OO
and I had the two ones on the right to myself. A guy and a girl from Toronto, Justin and Jacquie, sat behind me (also NOVA teachers) and I periodically talked to them throughout the flight. I was delighted to see that they seemed to be about as clueless about Japan as me, knowing absolutely no Japanese and not even having a guidebook, *phew*.

The 11-12 hour flight went by pretty quickly and because of the time change we spent the entire time in sunlight. They played three movies-- Batman Begins, Chocolat and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, but I'd seen all of them and wasn't really interested, so I just read most of the time. I learned all about Japanese history and will give you an interesting fact:

Back in the middle ages the Mongolians, who had thromped their way across Central Asia and briefly ruled everything until Hungary, tried to invade Japan. They kept sending small armies across to Japan and the Japanese would just behead them all. Finally, they decided to send a massive force over of something like 100,000 men into one of the southern cities. The Japanese were screwed, but by chance a typhoon hit that city on that day and completely wiped them all out. This typhoon became known as the "kamikaze" (translates to "divine wind"). So 750 years later, when honourable Japanese pilots agreed to fly suicidally into Allied ships during World War 2, these became celebrated as "kamikaze" missions (missions of the divine wind).

Anyway, with about an hour left of the flight, we began flying over Japan. I couldn't believe how mountainous the terrain was. Not the size of the mountains, but just that 80% of the Japanese islands' land is mountainous. The pilot announced a couple of minutes before we flew over Mount Fuji, Japan's highest peak, and we passengers were astir. Jeremiah waved me over to his side of the plane when we passed it by and it was incredible. In a sea of clouds, a giant dormant volcano was shooting up out of it, it looked awesome (in the non-colloquial sense of the word). I want to climb Mt. Fuji next summer. It's high enough that its climbing season is only the two warmest months of the year.

We approached Osaka Bay about a half hour before arriving at Kansai Airport (Kansai is the general term for my region which encompasses Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Nara, etc.). Due to Japan's general lack of empty flat space, Kansai Airport was built in 1994 out on the harbour, so as we're landing it almost seems as though we're going to land on water. You can see the coastline on both sides with mountains towering on the backdrop. I didn't realize it at the time, but we were still 45 minutes outside of Osaka.

Once the plane landed I hobbled off and up towards immigration. I was weak from having been sitting for the past 12 hours and was exhausted. I'd gotten insufficient sleep the past four nights and although it was only 4:30pm local time, the time change was huge (I think Osaka is 13 hours ahead of Halifax [AST] so when it's noon here it's 11pm the day before in Halifax).

After collecting my bags and going through immigration and customs -- Are you English teacher? Go on through. -- I exited into the arrivals area and met up with a NOVA representative, Yvette, who was waiting there for us. She said there were another three on our flight that we were waiting for and there was already a British girl named Zoe sitting next to her who had come on an earlier flight.

One of the others on our flight was a guy from Barbados named Alex. Strangely, he had also did his undergrad at Western and had gone on exchange to the University of Hong Kong for a year, but he seemed really unsociable and as though he wasn't happy at all to be in Osaka and didn't really talk to the rest of us. The last two to arrive were a pair of twin girls from Saint John, NB. One of their suitcases had been lost and they looked really exhausted and thrashed. One of them had studied at Dalhousie in Halifax and knew a number of people that I went to high school with. The 2 degrees of separation theory holds strong.

On a sidenote, I just went to get my fourth drink from the drink room-- I can't read all of the names so I sometimes just guess and this one has turned out to be piping hot, green and slimish-looking. I thought it was going to be mint but I think it's actually spinach-flavoured.

So the nine of us (including Yvette), went to check in our suitcases to be delivered to our apartments by a private company the following night. Although NOVA agreed to pay for this service, I decided at the last-minute that I prefered to bring my duffel bag with me so I wouldn't have to wait a day for all of my clothing to arrive, so I just passed them my big hiking bag and was on my way.

Yvette sent Justin and Jacquie off on a train and the rest of us were taking taking a shuttle bus into Central Osaka. I sat with Zoe on the shuttle bus. She comes from a steel town in western England called something hideous like Sludgethorpe and we discussed the TV show Lost. The drive into town was not at all awe-inspiring and somewhat unsatisfying.

I remembered the excitement of the MTR ride from the Hong Kong airport to Central HK, how everything was so different, so exciting -- palm trees, cruising from island to island, big green peaks in the background with massive buildings everywhere, everything was so advanced. Being on this Osaka shuttle bus made me feel like I was driving through the outskirts of a big American city at night... not too much to see but a highway surrounded by a lot of medium-level development.

We got off the shuttle 45 minutes later at Osaka Central Station (I may have just made that name up). We met a couple of other NOVA staff - I think all Australians - who were there to take us to our apartments. The others left and Yvette took me down to the subway. I was a bit disappointed that I still didn't feel the shock that I had felt upon arriving in Hong Kong, but things were just getting started.

This post is getting long, so instead of just leaving things here I'm going to move on to another post just in case it somehow gets deleted when I try to submit it. So, continue on above.